Downstairs from the control room is the vinyl-mastering room where engineer Cameron Henry is checking the settings on the vintage 1973 Neumann VMS 70 cutting lathe. Henry, who has been the in-house vinyl-mastering engineer for Welcome to 1979 since 2013, has cut masters for hundreds of LPs, but this evening’s event is his twelfth direct-to-disc session.

Isbell closes SideB with one of his own songs, the take-no-prisoners rocker “Never Gonna Change,” which he originally recorded as a member of Drive-By Truckers. In the cutting room, Henry continues to watch his lathe closely, peering through the microscope to check the progress of the snake-like grooves in the lacquer, and making minute adjustments to the cutting head.

As Isbell and the band reach the last verse of the song, Henry’s attention to the grooves intensifies. Grabbing the intercom phone next to the lathe, he tells Mara, “I’ve got abouta quarter-inch left. You may have to fade.”